For example, a card game machine that can play a card game, such as poker, blackjack or a fortune telling game, is known. In the card game machine, a displayed image of plural cards appears on the CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor. When the card game starts, some of the cards on the CRT monitor are changed or inverted (or turned upside down to show the backside graphic patterns of the cards) in response to operations of a player.
However, in the conventional card game machine, the card image merely appears on the CRT monitor, which is inadequate for the player to really enjoy the card game or duplicate “live” feelings of the card game. It does not sufficiently bring the realism of the card game into the player.
Moreover, in the conventional card game machine, the changing or turning of the cards is arbitrarily controlled by the computer. The players cannot check the computer-controlled card game for accuracy, and are liable to doubt the fairness of the card game.
To eliminate the problems, it is desirable to provide a card game which allows the player to actually touch the cards during the game. For this purpose, it is necessary to optically read an image from the cards and input the image to the computer.
In order to perform the reading of a stack of normal cards, it is necessary to perform the following steps, which includes: the step of transporting, one by one, the normal card taken out of the stack of normal cards to a reading unit; the step of reading, one by one, each transported card at the reading unit; the step of stacking the normal cards after the reading onto a card stacking portion. The above method of reading the stack of normal cards requires a mechanism for transporting the normal card to the reading unit. When such a mechanism is provided in a card stack reader system, the resulting system becomes large in size, and the normal cards may be damaged or stained. Furthermore, the period of reading all the normal cards becomes relatively long.